It might surprise you if you're not familiar with the writing scene, but there's an awful lot of crossover between those who write crime fiction and those who write horror. Here in the UK, authors who are members of the British Fantasy Society (nine-tenths horror writers these days) are often members of the Crime Writers' Association too ... and I'm sure that must be equally true in the US.
Not quite so surprising when you really think about it. Writers like John Connelly and England's Stephen Leather frequently blur the line between straight crime tales and supernatural awfulness. And even Stephen King has had a couple of good stabs at writing crime.
But here's the point I'm really trying to get to. I've attended plenty of events put on by both those groups, the BFS and the CWA. So have many of the horror writers that I know. And usually, those horror guys come back from a crime meeting chuckling and smirking. "I don't believe it," they keep saying. "Those guys think they're really dark. They don't have the faintest clue what dark fiction really is."
The assumption being that horror fiction -- with its Nameless Dreads, its Lovecraftian Terrors, its lightless writhings and spectral iciness -- is naturally the darker style of fiction. And yes, I used to believe that too.
That was until I started working on my second straight crime novel, The Tribe, the follow-up to my first detective tale The Desert Keeps Its Dead. I was about twelve chapters into that when I stopped with a sudden jolt, a startled realization taking hold of me.
"Hold it just a second," was the thought that started going through my head. "When I sit down to write a horror story, I'm describing awful things for sure ... but awful things that mostly cannot happen and mostly never will. A lake cannot come alive. People cannot be re-animated. Sea creatures can't look like human beings (and I've done that more than once)."
"But just take a look at what I'm writing now. People being badly and deliberately harmed. People being terrorized, kidnapped, even killed. These are awful things as well ... but things that really happen in the real world all the time."
Crime fiction is massively more popular than horror stuff, not only in book form but in movies and TV, but is the type that deals with death and murder really any lighter or more pleasant? Hannibal Lector, a flesh-eating monster in a human body? James Patterson's repellent sexual psychopaths? The bleak oppressive grimness of most Nordic Noir? The elaborate and gruesome demonology of Criminal Minds?
It's not just writers who cross over, it's their subject matter. And it happens in real life as well. Just this week in the UK a harmless-looking young man was sentenced to life for stabbing to death (frantically) a pair of sisters who he came across in a public park. He didn't even know them, and so why do that? He believed he'd made a deal with the Devil ... if he killed enough young women he would win the Lottery (and do much better on the dating scene, just as an added bonus).
Unbelievable, but it really happened. Horrible, but true. And it's that one word, 'true.' that's at the heart of this discussion.
Horror fiction might be a lot more graphic in the way that it describes appalling stuff, except that what's being described exists only in imaginary terms. You're never going to fall foul of a vampire or a zombie or a ghoul. But serial killers really are out there. So are psychotic lunatics. Not to mention all those guys who have no feeling for their fellow beings and would hurt or kill them just to make a tidy buck, or even sometimes just for fun.
And all of those things being true, the suffering of its characters based on genuine human anguish, crime fiction (or a lot of it at least) has to be regarded as in many ways the darker genre.
